UIndy professor, students help exhume bodies of migrants who died on perilous journey to U.S.

Jun. 21, 2013

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University of Indianapolis forensic anthropologist Krista Latham (left) joined Lori Baker from Baylor University in leading the exhumation of unidentified immigrants from a cemetery in Falfurrias, Texas. Most of them died from heat exhaustion while crossing illegally from Mexico into the United States. The bodies will be examined and cross checked with DNA sent from Mexico and Central American countries, with the goal of reuniting the remains with families. / John Moore / Getty Images

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For University of Indianapolis professor Krista Latham, the field of forensics isn’t just science. It’s also human rights.

The anthropologist and four of her graduate students recently spent a week at a rural Texas cemetery, helping exhume the bodies of unidentified migrants buried there. Their efforts are the first step to name these anonymous individuals, who lost their identities and lives while trying to enter the United States.

Working along with volunteers from Baylor University, the UIndy crew unearthed 63 unidentified bodies over the course of a week in May in the unrelenting Texas heat.

“This number of bodies is what you would get with a mass disaster situation,” Latham said. “We looked at this more as a human rights mission.”

Brooks County, Texas, about 1,300 miles south of Indianapolis, is home to two checkpoints along the Mexico border, making it a perilous place for those on an illegal journey.

Migrants come over the Rio Grande, led by “coyotes” — guides paid to smuggle them into the United States. The coyotes drive just shy of the checkpoint and then walk into the brush with their charges to dodge the checkpoints.

Rough terrain combined with brutal conditions combine to make the few days of walking challenging. Even though the group travels at night and rests under trees during the day, dehydration and injuries take a toll. Those who falter are left behind.

“Without a body, you can’t know if the person died or is still out there somewhere, suffering, waiting for help,” said Robin Reineke, director of the Missing Migrant Project, an Arizona-based agency that attempts to locate those who disappear. “The person is gone, but there’s no agreement on what has happened.”

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Did the person wind up in a hospital? In jail? Deported? Or worse?

Meanwhile, the bodies found lie unidentified in graves in Texas and Arizona and other places where people perish on their journeys north.

In Brooks County, public officials do not have the manpower to carefully photograph the unidentified bodies and take pre-burial DNA samples, which could help to identify them later. Instead, they bury them in unmarked graves in a section of the cemetery. Some of the bodies have been there for months, others for years.

Helping fill a need

Lori Baker, an associate professor of anthropology at Baylor, has been helping identify bodies along the border since 2003. Through this work, she heard about Brooks County’s dramatic increase in unidentified bodies.

In 2011, 64 bodies were found. The next year, that nearly doubled to 130.

The sparsely populated county did not have sufficient staff to handle them. Last fall, Baker approached authorities there to offer help.

“It disturbs them to have so many people buried anonymously,” Baker said. “They were looking for solutions. We just happened to offer one.”

Baker asked Latham, who has worked in Chile on the bodies of people who disappeared under the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, to join her.

Latham takes on about 100 human remains cases a year. The majority are found in Indiana, with some in Illinois. She and her staff work on the bodies in a secure basement laboratory in a building on the Southside campus.

Won over by the project’s service nature, UIndy covered travel costs for Latham and four students working on master’s degrees in human biology. Digging up decomposed bodies in 90-plus-degree heat may not sound like the best way to spend a week, but the students said they had no regrets.

"A dream project"

“It was just an amazing experience,” said Ryan Strand, one of the graduate students. “This is a dream project, to work on, at such a personal level, dealing with real human remains.”

Working with about 20 Baylor volunteers, the students brought a forensic archaeologist’s touch. Their trained eyes can distinguish a piece of bone from a rock, and they know offhand how many bones a skeleton has.

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Days at the cemetery started around 6:30 a.m. and ended by early afternoon as the weather grew hotter and stickier. Temperatures routinely reached the mid-90s with high humidity. As they got closer to handling human remains, they had to don head-to-toe hazard suits.

“We treated each individual as an open forensic case,” Latham said. “We treated it just like we would an archaeological or forensic investigation.”

Some of the bodies were buried in plain wooden coffins, while others were thrown unceremoniously into the dirt in body bags. Only about 20 percent of bodies are found intact enough to be recognizable, Baker said.

Now that the bodies have been exhumed, scientists will try to learn as much as they can about them — approximate age, sex and other characteristics such as from where they came.

Just under 50 percent of the migrants who come through this area are Mexican, Latham said. The rest are Guatemalan, Honduran, El Salvadoran and Chinese.

Then, researchers will see if they might match any of the missing person reports filed with the Missing Migrants Project or in the national database. If there’s a high suspicion that the remains belong to a specific missing person, they will try to get DNA samples from family members to compare to those taken from the remains.

“Our hope is that some identifications will begin rolling in,” Latham said.

Some of the bodies may come to UIndy for Latham to work on once the paperwork has been completed to allow them to do so.

As the group worked, they had reminders of how their efforts could bring comfort to a family.

A grateful call

On her first day on the site, Baker took a grateful call from a woman whose son had just been identified with DNA analysis. Now, this woman said, she has a place to put flowers.

“It’s a weird way to choose to do a social good, but seeing what we did and knowing it helped the community just gelled it all for me,” said Justin Maiers, one of the UIndy graduate students.

Some may scoff, saying that the deceased are criminals who have died in the act of entering the country illegally. Such arguments do not faze Baker, who said her work costs taxpayers nothing. Among the bodies in her lab is that of a 12-year-old boy. Doesn’t his mother and all the others deserve to have a body to mourn, she asked.

The argument resonates with Latham. She’d like to contribute more, she said.

She will have that opportunity. She plans to return to Brooks County next summer. About a dozen of the skeletons are on their way to UIndy for further analysis. She, Baker and a colleague at Texas State University will work together to provide as much information as possible on all of the remains recovered.

“We want to make sure we try to identify everyone,” Baker said. “We will work until we can get everyone at least a biological profile and a DNA profile.”

There is not any sign that the deaths will cease. Already an additional 37 unburied bodies await Baker at a Brooks County funeral home.